On Fri, 2004-04-02 at 11:40, Rex Johnston wrote:
> > I've spent years programming in VB, FoxPro, SQL(variants a many),
> VBA, ASP,
> You have my sympathies.
Heh.
> > I've yet to actually see a fully interactive GUI based development
> > and debugging enviornment such as you get with VB, ASP (Visual
> > Interdev) and the rest of the Microsoft tools.
The standard Unix, and FLOSS, approach to creating tools is: do one
thing, and do it well. So the text editor handled the editing of text,
the compiler compiled the text, and the debugger debugged the code. You
can swap out parts of the chain to suit your needs and taste. For
example, I use
XEmacs -> gcc -> DDD
while others may use
KDevelop -> gcc -> gdb
or
Kate -> Intel CC -> DDD
or
Eclipse -> IBM JRE -> ...
or
Together-J -> gcj -> DDD
or
Vim -> Python -> gdb
ad infinitum.
It could be argued that Unix *is* an IDE, with man-pages, editors,
compilers, and debuggers all mixed into the same environment. The
problem is the IDE is so all-encompassing you cannot see it!
But this is not your point. You want a shiny GUI, with buttons, and
colours ;) There are quite a few out there; I suggest KDevelop or
Eclipse, which seem nice if you like that sort of thing.
> It sounds like you need to learn emacs. I tried once for a few months,
> and while it's an impressive toolkit/IDE, it wasn't for me.
I love the Emacs family of editors, but, like Vegemite/Marmite/Promite,
it is a matter of taste.
> Personally, i use vim.
Personally, I think all vi users are sick and twisted :P (I know enough
vi to get a real editor installed on a Debian box, and that is all I
want to know!)
Kate, which is embedded in KDevelop IIRC, is another popular editor.
The latest GNOME Text Editor does do syntax highlighting, but it will
never be as fully featured as Kate as it has quite separate goals.
> It doesn't integrate a debugger, but since i'm programming mostly in
> java & some C, it doesn't need to either.
DDD is a good stand-alone debugger. Often I do not need an interactive
debugger; I wait for a core-file to be dumped and examine it with gdb to
figure out where the problem occurred.
> > I'd start developing more applications for the Linux platform but
> > I've yet to see anything other than very basic 'code and compile'
> > CLI enviornments that I used to use back in the early 80's. That to
> > me is a huge step backwards.
It is not necessarily a step backwards. For an expert user (as most
programmers are) a CLI is faster to use and more powerful than a GUI. A
poorly written CLI is a step backward, but tools like GDB and bash, with
their command-line completion and other interactive features, are not
the same as the ol' CP/M and DOS prompts!
Things can stay the same for a reason, not just because of laziness.
Programmers are still frequently bound to the code-compile-execute-debug
cycle, despite all the modelling tools, languages, and GUIs that have
been thrown at the problem.
The core task of a programmer â to translate fuzzy real-world concepts
into unambiguous machine-interpreted commands â remains as hard today as
it ever was. No GUI will help with that.
--
Michael JasonSmith http://www.ldots.org/
